Dzar-Ghan (Alien Barbarians of Vandruk #3)

33. Chapter 33

JENNA

As if I needed any additional pressure, I thought, dismayed. I hadn’t slept much during the previous night, going over Dzar-Ghan’s words. His admission that there had been another, a woman he had promised himself to. The look of dismay on his face when Grohn-Vhyn had mentioned her had nearly taken my breath away. So many emotions had danced over Dzar-Ghan’s features. I knew him well enough by now to recognize the look of guilt on him. He felt guilty for having failed her . I didn’t need to be an empath for that. A blind person would have recognized the look. It hadn’t helped that he had quickly turned the subject of our discussion back around. He hadn’t wanted to talk about Mynarra.

Mynarra , her name echoed inside my head, robbed me of sleep, and I wished I’d had the courage to ask Dzar-Ghan about her before he fell asleep. I should have asked him , I reprimanded myself. You’re a coward, Jenna Angelica McKenzie , I accused myself.

I tried to distract myself by going over the experiments I had done with the pit acid. Reminded myself that a few years back, I had opened the sealed door to an ancient tomb in Sumatra that was believed to be older than eight thousand years. Radar and scanners had given me somewhat of an idea of what to expect on the inside and the locations of possible artifacts. I had been a nervous wreck, opening a hole in a rock wall that had been sealed for millennia. One miscalculation could have blown up irreplaceable, never-before-seen artifacts of a culture that had lived so long ago that little to no proof of their existence had been left behind. I had never thought it would be possible I would ever be this nervous again.

I had been wrong.

The way I felt was a thousand times worse. The responsibility on my shoulders was nearly crushing, and not even Dzar-Ghan making sweet love to me that night could dispel it.

It wasn’t just that, though. Deep in my subconscious mind, I wondered how he would react to seeing the remains of his dead family. I was fairly certain that any remains in that cave would be well preserved. I wasn’t an archeologist or forensic anthropologist, but I had done enough cave exploring to know how well biological material could be preserved in certain conditions, especially in caves.

Dzar-Ghan and I had had a small fight about who should enter the cave first, but since he didn’t want to take a torch down with him and I refused to give him one of my chemical sticks, he had to give in and allow me to enter first reluctantly—but warned he would be right on my heel.

First, though, I had to create an entrance point. After a few experiments, I figured out that the acid had a relatively short shelf life. Once I poured it over rocks, within a couple of hours, all the acidic effects were lost, and one could even handle touching objects that survived having been doused with it.

Dzar-Ghan watched me like a hawk as I began to pour the pit acid down the area we had mostly cleared of rock debris. His body was primed to jump for me at a second’s notice. I couldn’t blame him after all the clumsiness he had witnessed on my part, but strangely, as soon as I held something dangerous in my hands or equipment, I never tripped or stumbled. Never spilled, never faltered. I was steady as… a rock, no pun intended. It was probably because I usually had my head in the clouds , as my mom used to say. She wasn’t wrong. At any given time, my mind spun a hundred thousand miles an hour in different directions. Only when I was at work and truly focused was when I was in my element, and once I was there, nothing tripped me. All my senses were on high alert, wholly fixated on the task.

With bated breath, I watched the pit acid leave the bladder container and pour onto the rocks. Without sound, it began to eat its way through the surface. Moving farther and deeper. I waited until I was sure it had reached its maximum distance before I poured more at a different spot, increasing the circumference of the slowly generating opening. It needed to be large enough for the big Vandruks to climb down on a rope as well as give enough room for a body to be transported up. A very fragile body.

The option of trying to dig out from the inside had been brought up, but sooner or later, we would reach the same point where only more rocks would rain down on us. Until that amount was depleted, the rocks would keep coming. From what I had seen from up higher, the rocks ready to hail down appeared to be nearly infinite.

I didn’t tell Dzar-Ghan that it looked as if this rockslide would have happened eventually. Telling him that wouldn’t have changed the outcome, and by the way the Vandruks believed in their gods, it might only have affirmed their belief that their god Vorag had intended for this to happen. Right on that fateful day. I didn’t like withholding this information, but I disliked the notion of the priests assigning women to men even less. So there was that.

The second round of pit acid ran its course, and I readied myself for a third, this time going for depth. I wanted to see how deep the cave ceiling was before I widened the opening.

It didn’t take long before I needed a second bladder of acid and then a third, but finally, I reached a hollow spot. I made it. I had broken through the ceiling. Triumph seared through my chest like always when I accomplished whatever I had set out to do, finding a well of oil, a new diamond mine, natural gas, or breaking into a tomb. It always made my chest swell with a feeling of incredible accomplishment, and this time, it was even stronger than usual.

I broke one of the chemical torches and dropped it down through the opening. It made its way to the ground, illuminating it for me to some degree.

“Looks about forty feet deep,” I informed my rapt audience, knowing they had no clue. I did some quick math. “About five or six of you standing on each other’s heads.”

“Jenna.” Dzar-Ghan’s voice sounded choked.

“Come and see.” I waved him over.

Not waiting for an invitation, Grohn-Vhyn followed right behind Dzar-Ghan. Both men were careful not to step on the edges where the pit acid was still active.

An expression of raptness moved over both men’s features as they stared down at the greenish light given out by the chemical torch. Illuminating small bundles—I swallowed here—which were probably bodies.

The men stepped back, and I renewed my vow not to let Dzar-Ghan go before me. There was no way I was going to let him set eyes on the tragedy waiting for us without being there to comfort him or prepare him.

Now that thought sounded good in theory, but when I was slowly lowered down—after another shouting match with Dzar-Ghan—I couldn’t help the unease creeping up on me.

This was a lot different from the ancient tomb I had explored. For starters, even though I had opened the entrance, I wasn’t the first one in. Secondly, besides the mummified remains of what we later found out had been an until then unknown Sumerian king, there hadn’t been any other bodies, not like here, where I could already see countless bundles on the ground.

The air around me was stale, as I had expected. I even had expected an atmosphere of tragedy, but this was more, so much more. It was as if I could physically feel the hopelessness of these poor, trapped people, feel their desperation.

You’re going off your rocker, and your imagination is getting the better of you. Keep it together, McKenzie , I scolded myself.

Some of the heaps lay in groups, some alone, some in twos. Still, something seemed off to me. From what I had learned, there should have been thousands of bodies here. Eighty percent of Vandruk’s female population, but from what I saw, the numbers might have gone into the hundreds, not thousands.

I swallowed and forced myself not to come to any conclusions yet. The cave was massive; even from the little bit of light from the chem torch, I was able to discern that it was larger than a football stadium, absolutely mesmerizing. Openings hinted at several veering off tunnels. The women might have wandered off into what appeared to be a massive cave system.

My feet hit the ground. I had picked a good spot; no bodies lay within ten feet of me. Nothing had been desecrated by the pit acid that might have dropped down, and from the looks of it, there had been a few. I made out a small number of holes that I was willing to bet were fresh and from the acid.

“Jenna?” Dzar-Ghan called up from above.

“I’m all right. Give me a few minutes,” I yelled up, taking the rope off from around my torso and underneath my shoulders where it had been placed before they lowered me down.

I lit a few more chem torches and began placing them around the cave, moving toward the first bundle on the ground. I took a deep breath, stealing myself for what I was about to see.

The body was perfectly preserved. Mummified, as I had thought it would be. The skin had darkened, but I was sure that her features were still clear enough to be recognized by a loved one. The woman looked to be in her fifties. It was hard to tell, but there were some gray strands in her reddish hair underneath a small layer of dust.

Her arms, wrists, fingers, and even feet were clad in precious gems, of which I had no idea what they were. The geologist in me wanted to inspect and study them; some looked red like garnets, others blue like sapphires, but I was sure they weren’t either, maybe the Vandruk equivalent…

What I was sure of was that this person had been someone important, maybe a khadahrshi. She was lying there alone, breaking my heart at the thought that she had died without anybody holding her.

The ground underneath her looked funny, darker, especially around her head. The greenish chem torchlight played tricks with my eyes and the coloring, but I could have sworn it looked like dried blood. I don’t know why I touched her, but some voice inside me told me to turn her around. With a hiss, I stared at the caved-in skull and nearly dropped her body. I had barely enough sense to carefully let her down. She was still someone’s wife, mother, sister.

“Jenna?” Dzar-Ghan again.

“Just a min!” I yelled back, without realizing that he probably had no idea what I just said. But my mind was firmly planted on the poor lady. Had she fallen and hit her head? But why wouldn’t anybody have moved her body? Why would they have let her lie here? This place almost looked more like all these people had died at the same time, not days apart as would be the case if they had starved to death.

Considering the cave’s size, I doubted they would have died of asphyxiation. With a heavy sensation in my stomach, I made it over to where two bundles lay arm in arm. Tears gathered in my eyes when I realized it had to be mother and daughter.

Bile rose up my throat when I noticed large stab marks in both of their chests.

“I’m coming down.”

“No!” I yelled, rising and nearly tripping over a leg. “Stay up there. I’m coming back up.” I didn’t want Dzar-Ghan to see this. I really didn’t . I didn’t want to see this.

These people had not died being buried by rocks, starvation, or asphyxiation. These women had been killed.